Time Rift
by VampedVixen
Summary: Hiro wants Kensei to be a real hero and sets out to change history to see that happen. Again. And again. And again.


_Written for the Holiday Heroes Prompt: Groundhog's Day. I took a bit from the movie with the same name and then I stretched the prompt as far as it would possibly go without breaking it completely.. though I may have actually broken it. Votes are still out on that one._

_This is also the first time I've written Hiro and only the second for Adam, so I'm a bit nervous. Eek!_

* * *

It wasn't supposed to turn out this way. 

Kensei was supposed to be a hero, with his beloved Princess by his side while tales of his epic battles were described in stories that would be told for centuries after his death. He was not supposed to be a _gaijin_ or a drunk or a coward. It wasn't in the hero's nature to hurt people or take over Japan or try to destroy the world with a virus in present day Texas.

Hiro knelt by the gravestone where he deposited his hero's body and left him to rot in the underground prison. Adam scratched at the cover of his tomb while screaming himself hoarse and though the noise was faint, Hiro could not turn away.

"I failed you." The fanboy told his hero and enemy. "Or you failed me. I am not sure."

History was broken, all because of his foolish heart. A real hero would never put love before loyalty, or the fate of the world at that matter. True heroes accepted the blame and responsibility of their actions and would not rest until they made amends.

It fell to his shoulders to fix things now. There was no one else in the world who make things right again. Hiro scrunched his face up in concentration and vanished from the present day.

* * *

Hiro had been standing underneath the red maple tree, waving his arms in protest to his hero's plan for ten minutes now. Kensei refused to come down, still adamant that his plan would work and that it did not consist of cheap and dirty tricks. 

Hiro couldn't make him see how wrong it was to send a man in his armor out to the battle field so he could hide up in the tree like a coward. He couldn't make him see why Kensei needed to be exactly as he was in the storybooks if the stories were to come true. And he was rather frustrated by the whole situation.

"I believe you should go into battle to defeat the army by yourself."

"And I do believe you're crazy." Kensei told him and took another swig of ale from his deer skin pouch. He dangled his legs over the tree branch, starring down at Hiro. "Wait.. just how do you know my plan anyway. You never told me-- have you been stealing my battle plans?"

"There is no time to explain." Hiro huffed in exasperation. "You must go and defeat the army or history will be broken."

"You mean that army?" He gestured to the clearing, where duplicate-Kensei was riding hard and grimaced as if watching something horrible. "I'm not quite sure I want to be Kensei right now."

He said the name as if it were something he could put on or take off at will, like the role of a hero when it was useful to him and when it was not.

Hiro looked in the direction Kensei was so intently starring, only to see duplicate-Kensei run through with a sword by one of the soldiers. Too busy saving Kensei from his own cowardice, Hiro could not be there on the field to stop the decoy from getting killed in a shower of pointed arrows.

A life for a life-- he wondered if it was worth it.

_No_, he thought. _A hero must always consider each life as special as the next. I have failed._

In a moment of despair and guilt, Hiro lost control of his powers and arrived back in New York City.

* * *

On his second day in present day New York City, Hiro decided to return home. There was nothing more he could do in America. He fought Sylar and won, he changed the past and was through with that. He could go home now and return to the boring, desk job he knew, no matter how much he hated it. 

Unfortunately, his father's company had other ideas for him. They kidnapped him while he was waiting for a bus to the airport and dragged him out to an abandoned building where his father was waiting for him. Though Hiro was ecstatic to learn that his father was alive, it was a double edged swords because his father had never looked angrier with him.

"I am sorry, Father." Hiro bowed deeply. "I was gone for a long time because I was with Kensei. I was teaching him how to be a hero."

"Heroes?" His father fumed. "There are no heroes in this world. All those who fight in this world die before they are old enough to grow hair on their face. They are a silly superstition and you are old enough to give up such nonsense. Who is this Kensei of which you speak?"

"Kensei, father. You told me stories of him when I was a child."

"Do not waste my time, Hiro. You know better than to believe me patient enough to listen to such foolishness."

"But father--"

Suddenly Hiro knew what was happening and the truth crashed upon him like a punch to the gut. A world without Kensei.. without heroes who fought for what they believed. Hiro could not fathom such a place and yet he helped create it.

He needed to go back.

* * *

"Otsu is burning! We must hurry!" Hiro rushed up to his hero, attached his hands on Kensei's arms and teleported him to the city. All around villagers were helping put out fires on their neighbor's thatch roofs, desperate to save their homes and their lives. 

"What the hell did you do to me?" Kensei staggered around, unused to traveling this way. He didn't seem to notice the village around him or the soldiers behind him; he was too wrapped up in his own problems. "Are you a wizard? Or some strange illusion brought on by too much drink?"

"Watch out!" A short, muscled Otsu villager jumped on Kensei, saving his life as arrows flew through the smoky air.

It was that act that put the story off track and sealed the hero's fate.

One by one, the dominoes were knocked down and before long the Otsu villager became known as The Prince in the legends. Too preoccupied with his new lover, Kensei never searched out his Princess, he never defeated Whitebeard's army and he never ripped out his own heart to save the love of his life.

He also never sought to kill his friend, murder his Princess or conquer Japan.

It was a different ending to the story but Hiro was sure they would be okay.

* * *

The future was a much different place by the time Hiro returned to the twenty-first century. There was a distinct, new darkness that reached in and grabbed his spirit from the very first step he took in the city. The streets were empty, deserted. When he passed a rare straggler on the street how to get to the airport, they kept their heads down, mumbled incoherently and scurried off before he could get a more direct answer from them. 

Posters of Kensei-- or Adam of Otsu as he was now called, covered most of the New York city buildings. He was a leader of some sort nowadays, though the normal average citizen seemed terrified of him when ever Hiro brought up the name.

After a few hours of being there, Hiro grew curious enough to look for his own answers at the library.

He walked there with his head tucked down, so as not to be spotted by the police. In this world, it seemed a terribly bad idea to get into a confrontation of any sort with the authority.

"I would like to know of the past." Hiro told the head librarian of the New York City Public Library. Her clothes and the expression on her face were both gray, lifeless and colorless. "Where are your history books?"

She darted her eyes around and gave off the impression that she was too afraid to answer such a simple query. "Who sent you?"

"What?"

"We don't have any history books. We don't keep history books. We know the laws."

Hiro frowned. "I- I do not understand. What law?"

The librarian whispered, "Your accent.. you're not around here are you?" He shook his head and she continued, reluctantly. "Adam of Otsu doesn't want history books kept in the public librarian, or any libraries for that matter. I don't suppose a foreigner would know that, but if you want to survive here, I wouldn't go around poking at the past."

"Why would he do that?"

"Who can know for sure? He's been alive and in charge for too long for anyone to know the truth anymore. Some say he is a demon, others say he's only an immortal who grew cold and bitter towards humanity when he found he couldn't die and join his Prince. But you didn't hear that from me, understand?"

He nodded. He understood. He broke history yet again.

* * *

There was a way to twist events so they would turn out according to Hiro's wishes, he was sure of it-- he just had not found it yet. He made several changes, going back and forth through history. After every edit to the timeline he made, Hiro prayed things would be better but something was always wrong. 

In some Adam would be alive, but still the same old crazy, bitter villain.

In others, Hiro would find out that Kensei never existed at all, or Hiro himself was never born.

There were some present universes so disfunctionally strange Hiro couldn't make sense of how his one little change to the past effected the world that much. There were worlds were Japan was annexed by Great Britain, or the Shanti Virus was able to somehow bring mutated dinosaur creatures called ulurus to life. There were worlds were his friends were dead, where Adam was dead-- where he was dead.

It was like flapping butterfly wings, or a really bad episode of Sliders. Being the avid science-fiction fan that he was, Hiro knew he shouldn't be messing around in the past, but he had to do something. The way things turned out originally, with Adam buried six-feet under in Aoyama Cemetery, and Hiro's heart broken over the loss of his hero-- was just terribly _wrong_.

He would see everything from the beginning and pin point the exact time and place where things went so horribly wrong, so that he could fix it. It was a riddle, a puzzle in history and time but he would work it out. Time rifts be damned.

* * *

"This is no time for lucky guesses." His-- no, Kensei's-- Princess told him as they sat together, she with her painted scrolls and Hiro with battle plans. She was still beautiful, though this was the thirtieth time they'd had this same conversation. Or perhaps it was their thirty-first; Hiro had lost count somewhere in between the future with the mutated virus apocalypse future and the future where Adam and Sylar teamed up to destroy Japan. There was just too many to keep track of anymore. "The fate of the world is at stake." 

He knew that. He was sure he did.

She was talking of the plan to attack Whitebeard's camp, but his mind was on other things, other futures. The fate of the world was always at stake.. and he always failed to make the right move. "You're right. I am sorry."

"Tell me, Hiro. Why are you still here? Why do you continue to risk your life?"

He turned away, unable to find the answer.

* * *

The sky burned in this future, an aftereffect of a nuclear winter created by the company. Hiro found out the truth of the horrors of this present time in Odessa; no humans were left to explain things to him anymore. Everyone was dead. And he was so tired.

Hiro teleported and reappeared in the cemetery, the one where both of his heroes were buried-- Kensei and his father. He wasn't sure if they were still there, underground in this new alternate universe. Probably not, but he fell to his knees in front of the familiar gravestone anyway.

"I wanted to fix it, Kensei." Hiro pulled at the dirt as he knelt. There was no grass here, no life anywhere in this world. He'd killed it all, which made him entirely unsure of who was the hero and who was the villain in the grand scheme of things. "I wanted you to be a hero.. my hero, but I can not find the right path for history to take to get us there."

"Perhaps _there_ is not a place we should be then." Hiro heard someone walk up behind him. The familiar armor silhouetted in dark shadows on the ground but Hiro could not bring himself to look up to find the reality behind this illusion. Back when he was a child and school was too rough for a dreamer like him-- or his father was angry with him again over some obligation he failed to fulfill-- Hiro used to make believe his hero was standing by his side. In a way, Kensei always would be watching over him and would always be his hero, even if just in his imagination. "Do what you think is best, Carp."

* * *

Every second of Hiro's last attempt to change the past was lived exactly the same as his first. He walked through the whole week, purposely doing every single thing the same way he did when he broke history. He trained Kensei to be a hero, only to fall in love with Yaeko and find himself in a love triangle once again. His friendship crumbled and Kensei grew to hate him. His hero was gone once more.

He didn't want it this way, but this was the way it had to be.

After all, the only alternatives were far worse.

-THE END-


End file.
